Faculty A-Z

Inessa Medzhibovskaya

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As a scholar and educator, Prof. Medzhibovskaya is interested in how literature transmits human values in their cultural and historical specificity and universality and how literature reveals worlds hidden from plain view. Her focus in the classroom is on teaching students how to read well and express themselves well in order to think creatively about their unique role in the world. She is the author of the first definitive study of Tolstoy’s religious and philosophical evolution, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time (paperback 2009), and has published some forty journal essays and book chapters on literature (focusing mainly on Tolstoy and other Russian authors and philosophers), ideology and education, and the interplay of philosophy, religion, politics and literary aesthetics. She is editor of two volumes forthcoming with Northwestern University Press, Tolstoy and His Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century, and the first annotated critical edition of Tolstoy’s tract On Life (co-translated with Michael Denner). She is also continuing with two new monographs: Tolstoy and the Fates of the Twentieth Century (for Princeton University Press) and with a study titled Writing and Confinement.

Degrees Held:

PhD, Slavic Languages and Literature, Princeton University

Recent Publications:

"Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World," Modern Language Review Vol. 111(3), p910-911 (July 2016).

“Goethe and Hegel in the Commissariat of Enlightenment: Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Program of Bolshevik-Marxist Aesthetics.” Studies in East European Thought, volume 65, nos. 3-4 December 2013 (227-241). Special issue: Hegel in Russia. Advisory editors Ilya Kliger and David Backhurst. published online April 2014. Online citation reference: DOI 10.1007/s11212-014-9189-y. Printed May 15, 2014. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11212-014-9189-y

“Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy on Art and Immortality” (with Caryl Emerson). Critical Theory in Russia and the West. Alastair Renfrew and Galin Tikhanov, eds. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group, 2010: 26-43.